Cask Protocol Dao Wins Transak ETHDenver Hackathon

During the ETHDenver conference Cask Protocol Dao won Transak’s Hackathon. Team Cask’s Matt Brickley, Mike Machado and Matt Scifo were awarded $5000 USD. Their project centered around reducing the friction of on-ramping users to DeFi, and the Transak team is now working with Cask to integrate their technology into the Transak platform.

Cask is a decentralized non-custodial protocol for managing recurring payment subscriptions between a consumer and a service provider, in addition to generating yield for all parties. The goal of Cask is to provide an opportunity for projects, dApps, communities and businesses to create sustainable business models by accepting crypto payments for subscriptions. The Cask Protocol widget makes it easy for merchants and service providers to have a “Subscribe with Crypto” button on their website or dApp. 

Building this key infrastructure will help more merchants migrate from Web2 to Web3. Subscriptions are represented by an NFT, and merchants even have the ability to set whether or not the NFT/subscription is limited and/or transferable.

Web3 has progressed at a phenomenal rate, but is still missing some key infrastructure. If web3 is to “onboard the next billion users”, it needs a few things:

• Sustainable business models for communities, DAOs and creatives
• A clear path for more web2 merchants/service providers to easily onboard

Sustainable business models are needed to allow creatives, DAOs, dApps, NFT projects to not only survive, but thrive. To date, one of the key pieces of technology that has been missing is a safe, secure way for non-custodial wallets to automatically make recurring payments. One-time NFT sales can certainly bootstrap a community, but without sustained income, will eventually wither. What has allowed SaaS/web2 businesses to grow so massive is recurring revenue.

“We are so happy that Cask Protocol decided to participate in our event during the ETHDenver event, '' said Yeshu Agarwal, Co-Founder and CTO, Transak. “Their time and effort spent during the event has not gone unnoticed. The technology they have built to date is promising and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them.”

“The Cask team is grateful to have won the hackathon and thrilled the Transak team is considering adding what we built into the Transak widget,” said Mike Machado, Co-Founder of Cask Protocol. “We believe our solution will help reduce friction in onboarding users of Cask as well as other dApps and protocols that use Transak. We appreciate partners such as Transak, who value the collaboration to move web3 forward.”

Team Cask just recently launched their testnet, which you can learn more about here. Cask has created a few example service providers that you can subscribe to as a consumer, or you can go ahead and register yourself as a service provider and create your own subscription business, including a simple to install checkout widget and a webhook bridge to receive webhooks.